Not A Good Look: Golriz Ghahraman (then an intern for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) poses alongside Simon Bikindi - the Hutu singer-songwriter whose "killer songs" played a deadly role in the killing of 800,000 to one million Tutsi tribes-people during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Ghahraman has come under intense criticism for not making clearer this, and other, associations with war criminals. That the Greens did not anticipate such attacks should be of real concern to the Ardern Government.
IN POLITICS, as in war, the aggressor’s first strike is
almost always directed against the defender’s weakest point. That being the
case, the National Opposition has clearly identified the Ardern Government’s
lacklustre political management skills as its primary target. Their secondary
target, equally clearly, is the Greens. This should be the cause of
considerable angst on the Government’s part. The Labour-NZ First Coalition’s
political management skills will improve with practice. Improving the Greens
political skills is a much taller order!
The Greens face a number of serious problems at the moment,
not the least of which is the extremely heavy workloads being borne by the most
experienced members of their tiny caucus. James Shaw, Julie-Anne Genter and
Eugenie Sage, as Ministers Outside of Cabinet, have their hands full just
bringing themselves up-to-speed with their portfolios. Of the remaining five
Green MPs: one is an Under-Secretary; one the Party Whip; another is
campaigning to become the next Female Co-Leader; and the remaining two are complete
newbies.
Unsurprisingly, it was one of the latter, Golriz Ghahraman,
who this week found herself in the cross-hairs of David Farrar and Phil Quin,
two of New Zealand’s most deadly political snipers.
Both men’s attention had been drawn to what can only be
described as the unnecessary grandiloquence of Ghahraman’s CV. Describing her
fairly modest role in the massive UN exercises known as the International
Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the Special
Tribunal for Cambodia (ICTs) in terms that made her sound like Geoffrey
Robertson and Amal Alamuddin Clooney all rolled into one, really was asking
for, if not trouble, then most certainly some pretty close enemy scrutiny.
That Ghahraman was not well-placed to withstand such scrutiny,
raises two obvious and important questions. Why did she draw attention to her
participation in these ICTs without fully disclosing her potentially
controversial roles as a member of the defendants’ legal team? And, why didn’t
the Green Party carry out the same sort of due diligence exercise on
Ghahraman’s CV as Quin and Farrar? At the very least, these simple precautions
would have allowed Ghahraman and her Green Party colleagues to anticipate
precisely the sort of attacks that eventuated.
The obvious lesson which the National Party will have drawn
from this incident is that the Green Party – or at least those responsible for
its communications strategies – are in the grip of a conception of politics
that places far too much emphasis on marketing and spin. Only the most
inexperienced (and cynical) public relations flack could consider it “okay” to
leave out of a politician’s most immediately accessible biography (the one on
her own party’s website!) something as potentially explosive as the information
that she had helped to defend people accused of genocide and other, equally
horrifying, crimes against humanity.
The incident will also have alerted National to the fact
that the Greens have learned absolutely nothing from the parliamentary bullying
meted-out to their colleague, the former Green MP, Keith Locke.
It was the Labour Party’s Opposition Research which dug out
of the pages of Socialist Action, the
Trotskyite newspaper which Locke edited for many years, a nugget of pure
political gold. The Socialist Action League had been an enthusiastic early
supporter of the Khmer Rouge – the revolutionary party led by Pol Pot which, in
1975, toppled the right-wing military government of Cambodia. As the editor of Socialist Action, Locke had celebrated
the Khmer Rouge takeover as a “victory for humanity”.
In vain did Locke attempt to explain to his parliamentary
accusers that, at the time the offending articles were written, neither he nor
the Socialist Action League were aware of the wholesale “politicide” unfolding
in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. John Pilger’s shocking revelations
that the Khmer Rouge had murdered millions of Cambodians, however, rendered
Locke’s after-the-fact explanations utterly ineffective. He had written in
support of Pol Pot – and for many MPs that was enough to place him beyond the
pale of political respectability.
The point of this cautionary tale? That a political party –
especially one which, like the Greens, attracts radicals and activists of all
kinds – not only needs to keep its institutional memory alive, it needs to keep
it kicking-in. The most important lesson to be drawn from Locke’s experience is
that political parties need to conduct exhaustive research into the backgrounds
of all its candidates, so that areas of weakness and vulnerability can be
identified early and, if possible, neutralised by preventive revelation.
It is supremely ironic that Ghahraman, Locke’s successor in
the role of Green Spokesperson for Global Affairs, was a member of the Special
Tribunal for Cambodia’s prosecution team for bringing the mass murderers of the
Khmer Rouge to justice. Ironic, too, that she, like Locke, has seen her
credibility in the Global Affairs and Justice Spokesperson roles severely
damaged by a failure to anticipate how the Greens’ enemies, however unfairly,
might turn the actions of her past, no matter how well intentioned, against
her.
After Ghahraman’s ambush, Jacinda Ardern will be acutely
aware that improving her government’s political management skills is not simply
a matter of keeping her own Labour Party safe from political snipers, but that
the job also entails teaching the Greens how to anticipate – and then dodge –
their common enemy’s bullets.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 30 November 2017.
